Blairism has become the analogue of Thatcherism – the spectre that must be
expunged

What is it with British political parties? Is there some masochistic tendency – a perverse self-destruct mechanism – which invariably makes them denounce the very thing that has provided them with unprecedented success? You must accept that there is an uncanny parallel between the Conservative modernisers’ renunciation of Thatcherism after a single electoral defeat which followed on 18 unbroken years of power, and the Labour party’s rejection of its New Labour incarnation after an unprecedented three terms in office.

Somehow the idea became received wisdom that winning three times in a row – and then losing – was a kind of moral catastrophe rather than being a simple (indeed, healthy) consequence of democratic life. Since when have politicians assumed that when they lose an election it must be a sign that everything they have been saying and doing is totally unworthy and repulsive to the people – who had, until that point, been voting for them consistently for nearly two decades?

But here we are again. Labour is roughly where the Tory party was around 2000: in full-on self-flagellation mode – renouncing the version of itself which had been its most stupendously effective election-winning formula in post-war history. Blairism has become the precise analogue of Thatcherism – the evil spectre that must be expunged before the party can regain trust and credibility. In the case of Tony Blair, there is a convenient – and fatally confused – issue which can be used to justify his disgrace. His foreign military ventures and his association with the Bush “war on terror” have given licence to his perennial enemies within Labour to cast his whole political programme into disrepute.

That he transformed the Labour message, so as to make it not only electorally attractive but consistent with modern British social attitudes, is deftly buried by the Neanderthal Left, which always hated his reforms and his attempts to break the party’s dependence on the trade unions.

This brings us to Ed Miliband, who was put into the leadership by those unions precisely for the purpose of driving out the last traces of the Blair heresy. So the lesson that Blairism learnt from Thatcherism – that contemporary British politics is now all about individual aspiration, self-determination and genuine fairness (which is to say, you get out of life pretty much what you put in), rather than the old Left dogmas of class hatred, passivity and state-run collectivism – must now be expunged from Labour’s message.

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That is the real root cause of the Miliband debacle. He is having to reconstruct his party’s philosophy without a foundation in what is now generally understood to be common sense. He cannot say anything that sounds remotely Blairite – and therefore obviously reasonable.

But he must know that simply uttering the pieties of the Old Faith is either risible (to those who remember the failed experiments of the past) or incomprehensible (to those too young to know what an “active government industrial policy” is). So he ends up talking gibberish. He cannot endorse outright the Coalition’s welfare reforms – even though they are phenomenally popular with just those aspirational working and lower middle-class voters whom he must win back – because that would make him sound like a revisionist running dog of the Blairist era.

So he has to produce his own version of a crackdown – which turns out to be the old Gordon Brown threat (never enforced) that all young people will have to be in education or training, or lose their benefits. He must accept that private business is the only source of wealth creation (because that has now passed beyond any sane person’s capacity for doubt) but this “wealth” can only be justified by the fact that it produces revenue which the government can distribute “fairly”. In his speech last week which was designed to prove that his party was not anti-business, he made this more or less clear if you understood the coded references.

In case you didn’t, his business spokesman Chuka Umunna helpfully elaborated: “In order to build a Britain where rewards are shared in a fairer way, it is, of course, crucial that we have growth.” And this requires “a thriving private-sector partnership with an active government”. In other words, Labour likes business so much that it wants to go into a “thriving partnership” with it: private enterprise will create the wealth and government will spend it. (This was the Brown-Balls philosophy: encourage private wealth creation in order to provide a limitless fund for public spending. It ended by bankrupting the country.)

This historic contradiction at the heart of Labour’s story is what makes Mr Miliband’s pronouncements so bizarrely, incurably confusing and dense. It is not just that he is a policy wonk who is incapable of talking like a normal human being. If that were all there was to it, his cerebral musings could be translated easily enough into something resembling English as it is spoken in the street. No, the Miliband doctrine is impenetrable because he literally does not know what he is saying. Before the Osborne economic recovery, Labour had a fairly clear – if profoundly mistaken – message: the austerity programme that the Government was launching would destroy any hope of growth as well as bringing further hardship to the lowest paid.

Then that strategy went horribly wrong. Not only did growth revive to a degree that even the Chancellor seemed to find quite startling, but the lowest paid were given tax breaks that helped to protect them from the worst effects of what Mr Miliband calls the “cost of living crisis”. (It was the growing army of higher-rate taxpayers who took the brunt of that.) So the Labour leadership was left with nothing – absolutely nothing – to say about the economy which seemed to have any relevance to reality. Interestingly, this is yet another parallel with the plight of the Conservatives during their most benighted period in opposition: they were left speechless by the 2008 financial crash when their previous policy of matching Labour’s spending commitments collapsed into deserved ignominy.

There is a further similarity between the Blair and Thatcher phenomena which their respective parties have quite consciously rejected: both of them, as individuals, were strikingly alive to the value of genuine debate. Blair and Thatcher in opposition and in the early years of government conducted politics as a more or less permanent seminar in which truly radical notions could be aired and vigorously disputed.

They were both seriously interested in argument. And what came out of that ongoing disputation was a new understanding of the country: British politics was no longer class-based. It was largely meritocratic, individualistic and suspicious of state power. We once had two major parties which accepted that truth. Now we scarcely have one.